Huh. Never unveiled the bubble? Wonder what happened there- and what on earth HR is hoping to learn from this. Kinda strange that the “bubble” never showed up in the video he hoped would explain everything…

Either that or the line “is one of my many stage personas” is key. To combine the obvious answer with the wild speculation on this thread, this player is in control of both Best and Bandit. I’m currently placing this as highly unlikely though.

No, Bandit is just a npc. A smart AI based on a multitude of fictional characters, players, and developers. She is 100% virtual but is sentient, and a mystery to Hurricane’s staff. The true reason behind bubble is then, not just to advance gaming, but to see just how the programs are evolving.

Dude. Bandit’s color scheme = Purple. Mustache guy’s tie = Purple. It’s pretty obvious Bandit is the persona he uses to try to interact with these people. Since he’s working through a regular PC interface, he doesn’t need to stick to his general bodyshape/gender.

Okay, see, now I’m going to go back to hoping that Payet turns into a villain again. Why? Because if he’s played Final Fantasy VI (Releases as Final Fantasy III in the US, of course), then I think he’d totally go all Kefka. Which would be GREAT.

I wonder if there’s a real pattern I’m noticing, that most of the players seem to have some religious symbol associated with them, mostly religious symbols that are displayed casually, as if in neglect of their significance:

1. Byron’s player wears a ring with a pentacle.
2. Gravedust’s player may be wearing a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl — in the comments to the previous page, Maribel wondered if it would be inappropriate to wear it to a convention.
3. Syr’inj’s player is wearing peace sign earrings. According to Wikipedia, the peace sign was invented in 1958, but rumor has it has an older, occult meaning.
4. Payet Best’s player flashes the sign of the horns, which has various meanings, particularly warding off evil spirits.

I don’t spot anything in this theme in the image of Frigg’s player — maybe the wrist cuffs? All I came up with there was BDSM references.

If Gravedust is wearing a tallit, he’s wearing a symbol with a fairly clear significance, from a conventional religious tradition, whereas the other three examples are vaguely associated with the occult and have unclear significance.

Speculation: all five of them display symbols with spiritual significance, without being fully conscious of the meanings of those symbols, and by doing so, inadvertently cast a magic spell. Dedalus’s “Hm” was his recognizing Payet’s player flashing the sign of the horns, the missing element he hadn’t noticed before.

I’m not hugely sure about this one. If I were building this into a story deliberately, I’d go out of my way to make the connection consistent – so Best’s “religious thingie” would be also the “yellow thingie”. Rather than something he did in silhouette.

Yeah, I wasn’t that sure about this theory to begin with, and I’m less sure now, since no one pointed out anything I’d missed with Frigg’s player. Also, the authors seem to be very clear about the color coding, and otherwise making the connection between players and characters very clear, so it’s not consistent that they would be sloppy about presenting this, if my hypothesis were correct.

At this point, I’m left with, the sequence begins with Byron’s player’s pentacle ring, and ends with Best’s player’s sign of the horns, and that’s probably just a coincidence.

The origins of the peace sign are a little flaky. Depending on who you talk to, it’s a combination of the flag semaphore signals N and D (N being both flags diagonally down, D being one flag straight up, the other straight down), to stand for Nuclear Disarmament. To those who draw it wrong and leave out the center vertical pole, it’s a Mercedes-Benz logo. To others, it’s Nero’s Cross, an ancient Roman execution method–like crucifixion, but upside-down and far, FAR more painful of a way to die.

It’s not a tallit. You only wear that when you are praying, not out and about. There is a fringed garment that observant Jews wear, but it is worn under your shirt, never over. Sorry, most likely this is just a scarf.

Also, the fringes on a tallit bear little resemblance to those of a scarf. Note in particular the twined and multiple-knotted corner fringes, which are much longer than the tassle-like middle ones. We don’t see those in the “Gravedust” silhouette.

I used occam’s razor to shave my beard with. I know it’s a bit disrespectful, but I ran out of normal razors and I would have needed to read through an entire instruction manual to figure out how to get my electric razor working, so it seemed like the most obvious choice.

Well, honestly, I never owned a 16-bit system. I got an NES when I was six, and really only had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Super Mario Bros. 3 to play. My friend from across the street had the SNES, so we got to playing Megaman X2 and the Ninja Turtles fighting game a lot. (After that, I got a Sega Saturn, but this is already turning into an overly long origin story)

I never really got into the 8-bit era until I discovered emulators. Woe is me.

Mario 3 and TMNT 2 (the one that aped the arcade’s side-scroll beat-em-up) were the proverbial jams. I have an older sister, so I spent more than a few hours trying to master her copies of Barbie and The Little Mermaid.

LM was a surprisingly high quality of fun, having been made by Capcom. Hell, most of the Disney games of the era were awesome (SNES Aladin anyone?). The Barbie one, unsurprisingly, had function and skill as mere afterthoughts and it was difficult as fuck to play. But we were kids, so that didn’t deter us in the slightest from trying to achieve the ultimate goal: Waking up from a post-shopping nap in order to be on time for a date with Ken.

Yeah, definitely in this category as well. Don’t have an exact age, but I know it was before any schooling lol. Super Mario bros 3, Super Mario World, and Link to the Past pretty much ate up my childhood. Teen years spent on just about every gamecube rpg.

I was BORN in the 16 bit/ NES age, but I wasn’t old enough to really appreciate it. I played a LOT of Megaman X and Donkey Kong Country. But I consider myself a child of the Age of Playstation more than anything else.

I suppose I started playing video games young, but I never really considered arcade games in the same way I do home consoles. Yea, I used to play a lot of Pac Man when I was five, but so? Didn’t everyone who could reach the controls play something or other in the local arcade? :P

I didn’t own a computer until nearly 2000. But I learned computer crap on the ultra mega old, TSR 80. I was learning (gulp) BASIC. And the best computer in the school was a Tandy 1000 or some similar number.

If I were any older I think I’d be quoting some crap about adding machines now. >.<

NGL, I’m kinda disappointed with Best’s player. I was hoping for either a complete 180-personality type of person where everything the character has done has been nothing but wish fulfillment or someone who’s way OTT that Payet’s character is actually a watered down version of himself.

Have to chime in after lurking for forever… Maybe the “hrm” is from the reference to multiple stage personas… What if, somehow, this douche is BOTH Payet and Bandit? Something went wrong and his personality fractured inside the game and created multiple characters?

Wait, wait… Don’t you get it?
“BLEEEEEEEEEEP” (with ten E’s, I counted) actually IS one of his many stage personas!
It’s like when Prince changed his name to that wacky symbol thing, and made everyone call him “the artist formerly known as Prince.” Shamelessly pretentious.

I would find it quite amusing if Bandit turns out to have been some reporter hunting for information on the bubble project, and got sucked in somehow. At this point that seems highly unlikely. The only reason the idea stuck me at all is because H.R. is focusing on the guy talking about hunting for information like the Fringe team (which made me snicker).

It’s Best. He referred to 8-bit and 16-bit games, which held dearly to the legacy and origin of the Final Fantasy series. To quote one of those games, and specifically refer to Payet: “You spoony bard!”

I think he’s more clueful than that — as in, he knows he’s referencing hiphop culture, but is at a remove from it.

I’m curious whether Best’s player is actually talented or not. I’m guessing he’s competent, but not exceptionally good, so that there’s an underlying insecurity to his pretentiousness, which would keep him on the same plane as the other players.

He looks to be in his middle or late twenties. A few times we’ve seen him (in Arkerra) space out, with a haunted look and a thousand-yard stare, and the scene before him is overlaid with a vision of the aftermath of terrible violence.

There are a lot of gamers who are or were in the military. My guess is that Byron’s player is a veteran, who was exposed to combat, and traumatized by it.

Nota bene: I don’t mean that Byron’s player ever did anything wrong himself. I believe he’s a fundamentally decent person. I’ve heard it argued that combat, especially modern combat, is intrinsically traumatizing; you can’t see such violence and be unharmed. I’m thinking his berserker persona is a way of working through the dark side of human nature. Note also his interest in the “dangerous” Lord Byron.

Ok, maybe we can make guesses as to Payet’s stage persona based on the bits of letters poking out. The first one looks to be either an H or a K, and I see a g about three letters from the end. There’s also a tiny bit of a letter poking up between the first and second E’s in BLEE…EP.

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